“Oh, of course I know I wasn’t very much to look at; but at least I matched. What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew. Pies or plowing or May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew. That’s the way hands and faces ought to work together. But you—you with all your rules and your bossing, and your everlasting ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’ you’ve snubbed all the know-anything out of my face and made my hands nothing but two disconnected machines for somebody else to run. And I hate you! You’re a monster! You’re a—Everybody hates you!”
Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite, she felt sure, would be a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned, it would fracture her skull. Naturally then, of course, it would splinter her spine. Later, in all probability, it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed, now that she came to think of it, had the arches of her feet felt less capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of the desk.
But the blow when it came was nothing but a cool finger tapping her pulse.
“There! There!” crooned the Superintendent’s voice, with a most amazing tolerance.
“But I won’t ‘there, there!’” snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide open again now, and extravagantly dilated.
The cool fingers on her pulse seemed to tighten a little.
“’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!” admonished the Superintendent’s mumbling lips.
“But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in her three years’ hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same moment. “But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” Desperately she jerked her curly blond head in the direction of the clock on the wall. “Here it’s four o’clock now,” she cried, “and in less than four hours you’re going to try and make me graduate, and go out into the world—God knows where—and charge innocent people twenty-one dollars a week, and washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands,” she gestured, “that don’t coördinate at all with this face,” she grimaced, “but with the face of one of the house doctors or the Senior Surgeon or even you, who may be ’way off in Kamchatka when I need him most!” she finished, with a confused jumble of accusation and despair.
Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair, and with her left hand, which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer, proffered Rae Malgregor a small fold of paper.
“Here, my dear,” she said, “here’s a sedative for you. Take it at once. It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you’ve had very hard luck this past month, but you mustn’t worry so about the future.” The slightest possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older woman’s voice. “Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment—”